The Green Man of Akron
photo by KJ Hannah Greenberg
by Joseph Phelan
We emerged from the lobby’s glacial climate, man and dog, to stroll along the offramp knolls—
heeding nature’s call. Addled thoughts dissolved into purpling dusk and twenty-one hindleg salutes. Crossing the soft green berm into a maze of silent side streets, we’re drawn like moths toward truculent lighting.
Nearly the last night of spring, Ohio air, floral and mossy, alive with possibility and rhyming with the wag of a loping white tail, we follow that persistent snout—confident in its quest for goose droppings in the dark.
Our kindred souls are sensitive and rational, our auras haloed by mayflies. The murmur of cars becomes hard to distinguish from the distant fall of crooked Cuyahoga. The tightening leash alerts me that we’ve ventured too far.
Commercial lease available, Embassy Parkway Pavilions, a cove of mirrored glass geodes encircling tar-veined asphalt and flickering amber lampposts. Probably all empty these days. But the once articulate landscaping is rewilding, atavistic and, seemingly, pregnant.
Fear begets fear. They smell it too. Hungover breakout session crowds and the pitbull that stalked us along Birmingham Road in Virginia.
A perfect lair—a void abhorred by the lost people and broken men.
Perhaps returning now, in bands, to the Ohio forests of their forebears.
This was once the great northwestern wilderness, after all. Washington camped on the banks of the Ohio and wild Ulstermen dug canals along Indian footpaths, beneath the primeval canopy. A squirrel could bound from branch to branch, from the Atlantic across Appalachia, unto the shores of Erie, Huron and Michigan, without ever once touching the ground. An arboreal rodent superhighway.
I fear the fentanyl and methamphetamine, animism among recyclables. Still, to be renewed as a pioneer in the parallel apocalypse? Writing ballads? New campfire songs for the ancient of days?
Moisture growing in my grip, pulsations in my periphery, someone loomed and leered, menacing limbs suggested by the rustling hostas.
Where the sidewalk stopped, a shrouded grotto spotted, a tent near the power box?
Let’s get out of here.
If we make it back to the cool sheets, with life and leash in hand, we’ll drink deeply and gratefully, bottled water splashed into the ice bucket top. We’ll wake, ourselves again, under the reassuring tiles of an acoustic ceiling.
Joe Phelan writes from the western suburbs of Chicago, where he lives with his wife, sons, and intrepid rescue poodle. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Ekstasis Magazine and Maudlin House.
KJ Hannah Greenberg tilts at social ills and encourages personal evolutions via poetry, prose, and visual art. Her images have appeared in Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Les Femmes Folles, Mused, Piker Press, Stone Lake Gallery, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, and many others. Her paintings and poetry are forthcoming in Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks (Seashell Books, 2024). To see more of her work go to kjhannahgreenberg.net/ .
